Google Wants You to Have a Faster Mobile Internet

April 19, 2012

Google Wants You to Have a Faster Mobile Internet
So they’re throwing billions of dollars at the problem to make sure you get it.

Setting: You’re sitting there waiting on your bus/waiting on your fajitas/waiting on your spouse to get out of the shower and so you pull out your reliable smartphone to check out what’s going on in the Twitter or in the CNN. Only, instead of using your wonderful mobile internet connection to fill in some indeterminate amount of waiting, you end up waiting nearly 10 seconds for your browser or app to load. So instead of filling in a waiting period with an actual activity, you fill in the waiting period with more waiting.

Sound familiar? It should, because when you compare the speed at which a website loads over a mobile connection to the speed at which a site will load on your desktop computer or laptop, it can feel prehistorically slow. That’s not to say that it’s objectively slow – you’re still in possession of the ability to browse the web from a phone, so who can seriously complain, right? – but it’s a palpable slowness. It’s also not always the fault of your mobile carrier, who may or may not be providing adequate services to speed you along, but more the poor performance of your browser and the sites you’re trying to browse.

Google is aware of your lost time and sympathizes with you, and wants to do something about your plight. That’s why the company is investing billions of dollars into improving the speed that webpages load on your mobile browser because, while your time is precious to you and you hate to see it wasted, for Google time is literally money. All that time you spend waiting around on webpages to load on your smartphone is literally time businesses and advertisers aren’t making money and you know what they say: time is money.

By enhancing its mobile browser as well as collaborating with other companies in regard to improving the way internet technologies work, Google hopes to counter all of the lost revenue due to people wandering away from slow mobile connections. Speaking to Bloomberg, Tealeaf Technology’s vice president Geoff Galat said, “There’s a big business impact to these kind of struggles.”

Faster mobile Web loads could increase mobile-commerce sales in the U.S. by 10 percent, or about $600 million a year, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester. They also could help online commerce in general: Almost half of mobile users are unlikely to return to a website at all if they had trouble accessing it from their phone, a 2011 study by Equation Research found.

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Faster mobile Web speeds also translate into additional mobile-ad revenue. A 30 percent improvement in mobile Internet’s speed could lead to a 15 percent rise in ad sales, said Trevor Healy, chief executive officer of mobile-ad provider Amobee Inc. U.S. mobile-advertising spending will reach $2.61 billion this year, up from $1.45 billion in 2011, according to EMarketer Inc.

Meanwhile, as Google hopes to close the loss of business revenue thanks to slow loading times on mobile browsers, you will no longer notice how long it takes for your sizzling fajitas to be brought to your table.